There's a funny thing about Vioxx. If Merck would have been up front about its risks, it would still be in use today. What doomed it was the coverup. For the vast majority of people who were on Vioxx, it helped with joint pain far more than OTC pain killers, and had virtually no side effects. There were a small group of at-risk people who really should not have received it. But bowing to the almighty dollar, Merck decided to put a lid on it, fearing that if it weren't prescribed to the at risk group, that would look bad for everyone else; their sales would therefore suffer moreso than just the few percent who shouldn't receive it.

Come on. If a drug killed 2% of its recipients, as this article supposes, it wouldn't make it out of mouse trials, much less a phase 1clinical trial (for those of you who need a crash course, a phase 1 trial is a small pilot study where only safety is measured, not efficacy). If the lower death rate had anything to do with Vioxx, its probably that people woke up to taking too many drugs generally, which could be a bad thing. To make the claim that Vioxx alone was killing 50,000 people per year would be silly, if it weren't so scary. Articles like this feed into the stereotype that doctors are out to get rich as fast as possible and have no regard for their subjects. But what they don't mention is that it was Merck's top doctor who was responsible for noticing the drug's problem. And the reason it took so long to be convincing is that the heightened death rate wasn't astronomical; it was pretty modest.

The fact is that Merck acted horribly irresponsibly, and they deserved to get sued up the ass for it. But the safety of Vioxx is not a cut and dry issue the way it has been portrayed in the media. Just another example of terrible science reporting.

And yeah, for the record, I took a course of Vioxx when I was about 20 to help mend a broken jaw. It worked really well, and I'm glad it was available at that time, as a jaw a a painful bone to break.